From Infamy to Honor:
KRUTCH, JOSEPH WOOD
From Infamy to Honor By Joseph Wood Krutch Author, "The Modern Temper," "The Measure of Man"; Professor of Literature, Columbia University NEARLY sixty years ago, Oscar Wilde went to prison,...
...The outburst leaves one still wondering just what was its motivation...
...a characteristic newspaper comment called him "damned and done for...
...Macauley's famous remark that there is nothing more absurd than the British public in one of its fits of morality would be a propos here if "absurd" were not so inadequate a word...
...Here it is from literally unspeakable infamy to public honor...
...We risk suggesting to young aspirants that it is really a sort of short-cut to artistic sensibility, and you will find highbrow critics solemnly discussing why (not whether, but why) it is the most suitable modern expression of the erotic impulse...
...Even Kinseyism is preferable...
...Professor of Literature, Columbia University NEARLY sixty years ago, Oscar Wilde went to prison, sentenced by a judge who had been his neighbor but who remarked from the bench that the maximum two-year sentence was "inadequate...
...Sometimes, it seems to me that at this particular moment we are almost too inclined to take a "reasonable" attitude toward homosexuality...
...A bright undergraduate once supplied me with a fine definition: "An epigram is a platitude in the making...
...Almost the whole of that public seemed insanely sadistic and ready to annihilate not only Wilde and his children but anyone who offered to do him any kindness...
...Not a few of his sayings are foolish and shabby...
...which is not to say that a reasonable attitude wouldn't be even better yet...
...But Wilde's greatness as a maker of phrases is best demonstrated by the fact that not even endless repetition of some of them can turn them into platitudes...
...But it is still true that those who think of him this year will be thinking more of a victim than of a genius...
...We are no longer surprised to "See nations, slowly wise and meanly just, To buried merit raise the tardy bust...
...his household goods, previously seized by bailiffs, were auctioned off for a pittance...
...His two pre-adolescent sons were hurried off to the Continent, given new names, and forbidden ever to mention their father in public on any pretext...
...the London County Council will mark the house in which he lived??and from which he was driven??with a memorial plaque...
...a friend who applied to the Court of Bankruptcy for appointment as literary executor was told that "Wilde's works will never command any interest whatsoever...
...But is there any other case in literary history quite so dramatic, quite so sensational as Wilde's...
...In any event, the English public put on a ghastly performance...
...That is almost standard procedure...
...Hardly more than half a century passes...
...still others, that this same public seized upon a deadly weapon with which to attack the whole new movement in thought in which Wilde and his fellow esthetes were playing at the moment a conspicuous part...
...A great deal of his prose and verse is feebly pretentious...
...What England is doing now is less reassessing the man of letters than simply confessing a brutal wrong...
...What can and must be said is that at his rare best he is sui generis and unequaled...
...Wilde's books were removed from the bookseller's shelves...
...His wife died some three years later, and some three years after that he himself died squalidly in Paris...
...This year, the centenary of his birth, Trinity College, Dublin is displaying the manuscripts of its former student...
...Scores of articles will assess and reassess his work, and it is not likely that even the least favorable will call him "damned and done for...
...Some will undoubtedly suggest that it was the result of the public's own suppressed homosexuality: others, somewhat more convincingly, that it was terror at the sudden emergence into public view of something of which the public was as terrified as it was ignorant...
...Even in this centenary year, few are likely to maintain that Wilde was a really major writer...
...At the time of Wilde's disgrace, Germany continued to hold his writings in absurd overestimation and France received the exile with a shrug...
...Here is no mere rise from neglect to recognition or even, as in the case of Ibsen, from "enemy of the people" to national hero...
...In order to convince oneself that even this sort of nonsense is preferable to the terrified brutality of the Victorians, one need only read Son of Oscar Wilde (Dutton, $3.75), by Vyvyan Holland, as the younger and only surviving one of the two boys has called himself...
Vol. 37 • December 1954 • No. 50
